Bookworm Sez: Moon Landing will send kids into orbit

Sunday

Dec 28, 2008 at 2:00 AM

Where’s the farthest place you’ve ever traveled to? Have you been to another country or even another continent? Does the idea of visiting a nearby town make you excited, or would a cross-country trip sound better? Would you like to travel by car, train, or do you prefer to fly?

Where’s the farthest place you’ve ever traveled to?Have you been to another country or even another continent? Does the idea of visiting a nearby town make you excited, or would a cross-country trip sound better? Would you like to travel by car, train, or do you prefer to fly?

How about a trip to the Moon?

It might be possible someday for a kid like you to take a quick trip there and back, but that wasn’t always the case. Space travel in your grandma’s day was only a dream until two American pilots stepped onto a dusty planet and planted a flag. Read all about it in “Moon Landing” by Richard Platt and David Hawcock.

Forty years ago, back when owning a color television was a luxury, computers were room-size monsters, and cell phones were unheard-of, going to the Moon was only for the movies. Travel to outer space – and return alive? Impossible!

That kind of thinking was the reason that practically everybody in America was glued to their TVs on one certain June evening in 1969. They were watching as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans ever to walk on the Moon. The story of how they got there is an exciting one.

If you’ve heard the term “Space Race”, you know that’s not the name of a new video game. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States and the Soviets were vying to see who would be the first in space. The first country to put a human in orbit would “control” the area beyond Earth’s gravity.

After carefully made orbits and flights by both Soviets and Americans, scientists realized that astronauts needed 10 steps, or stages, of operation to safely go to the Moon and back. The spacecraft they would require would have to be lightweight but strong. The voyage would require a lunar module that would leave the main rocket. And going would mean doing something that was (and still is) very daring and brave.

Forty years ago this coming summer, Apollo 11 astronauts made “one small step for (a) man and one giant leap for mankind”. Your kids don’t know a time when space exploration didn’t exist. Maybe they have their eyes set on Moon travel someday. “Moon Landing” is a great way to nurture that dream.

Filled with facts, statistics, a fantastic story, and lots of pictures, the best part about this book is that it includes lots of interactive pop-ups with windows to unfold, a globe of the Moon, lunar modules that show how the rockets were put together, and a huge diorama of the Moon landing, as well as pull-out booklets on early-thinkers and NASA astronauts after Apollo 11. Your kids will also learn about gravity, space, and the Moon; spacesuits; and surviving aboard an orbiting spaceship.

If you’ve got a future NASA scientist on your hands, you’ll definitely want “Moon Landing” in your house soon. For starry-eyed kids ages 8 and up, this book will send them into orbit.